CITY REPORT.

Four homes to be built fronting Rainbow Beach

September 12, 2004|By Jeanette Almada, Special to the Tribune.

A gated development of four houses will go up at 78th Street and South Shore Drive, at the rim of Rainbow Beach in the South Shore neighborhood. The project taps a rare opportunity to build directly on the lakefront.

Chicago developer F.O.R.U.M., owned by Phillip Bradley and Yesse Yehudah, bought a 110-by-130-foot parcel at 3016 E. 78th St. from a private owner three years ago. The non-profit developer (an acronym for Fulfilling Our Responsibility Unto Mankind) has rehabbed multifamily buildings throughout the city, many of them for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The Rainbow Beach project, however, is being built by a for-profit arm of F.O.R.U.M. called Community Construction.

The project is coming in advance of the expected redevelopment of the former South Works land along the lakefront just south of 79th Street, according to Ald. William Beavers (7th).

"Engineering plans are completed and we are working on a design to extend South Shore Drive from 79th to 85th Street, in preparation for development of high-rises, schools, a whole new neighborhood, on the land that was owned by U.S. Steel," Beavers said in a phone interview last week. He expects South Shore Drive, and Rainbow Beach, to be extended to 85th Street by 2006.

The land for the four-home development "is indistinguishable from the park land that is owned by the Chicago Park District, at Rainbow Beach," Bradley said in a phone interview late last month. "We worked closely with [Beavers], who did not want a high-rise to go up on that land, in order to come up with this plan."

Beavers said he helped the developer to win planned development status for the project on the condition that it would develop a low-rise project. Building the four houses as a planned development allows zoning variations needed to front the new houses eastward toward the lake, rather than westward toward the city as do other residential buildings standing on the east side of South Shore Drive.

Each of the four detached, single-family homes, designed by Chicago-based Vernon Williams and Associates, will have 3,600 square feet of space with prices starting at $500,000, according to Bradley. Two of the houses are sold, he said.

Even though the houses will be sold in fee simple transactions that transfer the land under each house to its buyer, Bradley expects that the green space within the development will be maintained by an association, funded by the homeowners.

Construction is expected to begin in March, with completion by November 2005.